A little backstory: YouTuber PatMac, best known for making excellent videos about a variety of video game merchandise, recently put out an massive video detailing the history of Sonic Runners and its updates.
For those who don't want to watch an hour-plus rundown, Runners was a high-score focused mobile endless runner created by Sonic Team themselves with some great looking visuals, an amazing Tomoya Ohtani soundtrack, and an incredible amount of fanservice with a huge cast of playable characters (including truly obscure picks like Tikal from Sonic Adventure and Mephiles the Dark from Sonic 06) and an even larger amount of "Buddies" that you could take along on your runs to give you special boosts and skills. You could bring characters like Caliburn, Chip, Shahra, Chaos 0, Opa-Opa, NiGHTS and Reala, a Sega Genesis... you could even have the massive Death Egg float behind you.
Unfortunately, absolutely terrible F2P monetization that made it absurdly difficult to actually get many of those characters and buddies as well as a deeply questionable 2.0 update left fans cold, leading to the game being deemed a failure by Sega and shut down just one year after its official launch - and due to the game being always-online, it is now completely unplayable. While a sequel (Sonic Runners Adventure) was later cobbled together by Gameloft from the remains of Runners as a paid mobile game, its significantly smaller amount of playable characters and buddies as well as its inferior visuals and music simply left fans wondering what could have been.
Luckily, it seems the renewed interest in Runners caused by PatMac's video has had an effect. Previously there was an short-lived attempt at reviving Runners through a fan server, but the lone person behind it (YPwn) was unable to keep it going for more than a month due to server costs and lack of interest. However, the surge of support from Runners fans after PatMac's retrospective has led to a second effort from YPwn and a team of volunteers to bring the game back once again (sans any form of monetization to ward off potential DMCAs). While there's even potential for adding new content, the focus is on getting the game working and improving the unlock methods for characters.
It's currently in closed alpha, but it's looking like Sonic Runners may yet get a new lease on life. Given that Runners is easily the most notable Sonic game that's entirely unplayable today, this is great news for Sonic fans should it pan out.
For those who don't want to watch an hour-plus rundown, Runners was a high-score focused mobile endless runner created by Sonic Team themselves with some great looking visuals, an amazing Tomoya Ohtani soundtrack, and an incredible amount of fanservice with a huge cast of playable characters (including truly obscure picks like Tikal from Sonic Adventure and Mephiles the Dark from Sonic 06) and an even larger amount of "Buddies" that you could take along on your runs to give you special boosts and skills. You could bring characters like Caliburn, Chip, Shahra, Chaos 0, Opa-Opa, NiGHTS and Reala, a Sega Genesis... you could even have the massive Death Egg float behind you.
Unfortunately, absolutely terrible F2P monetization that made it absurdly difficult to actually get many of those characters and buddies as well as a deeply questionable 2.0 update left fans cold, leading to the game being deemed a failure by Sega and shut down just one year after its official launch - and due to the game being always-online, it is now completely unplayable. While a sequel (Sonic Runners Adventure) was later cobbled together by Gameloft from the remains of Runners as a paid mobile game, its significantly smaller amount of playable characters and buddies as well as its inferior visuals and music simply left fans wondering what could have been.
Luckily, it seems the renewed interest in Runners caused by PatMac's video has had an effect. Previously there was an short-lived attempt at reviving Runners through a fan server, but the lone person behind it (YPwn) was unable to keep it going for more than a month due to server costs and lack of interest. However, the surge of support from Runners fans after PatMac's retrospective has led to a second effort from YPwn and a team of volunteers to bring the game back once again (sans any form of monetization to ward off potential DMCAs). While there's even potential for adding new content, the focus is on getting the game working and improving the unlock methods for characters.
It's currently in closed alpha, but it's looking like Sonic Runners may yet get a new lease on life. Given that Runners is easily the most notable Sonic game that's entirely unplayable today, this is great news for Sonic fans should it pan out.
